Mikaylie: Day 2: Portland ---> Portsmouth

First off I'd like to say how happy the title of this post makes me.

They both start with port!

Okayyyyy let's just jump right in shall we??

No unnecessary text today!

First, food:

*fun fact, humans need food to function properly.

I make sure that I can function and take full advantage of food. Especially free food.

I also take pictures of like everything I eat.

Because, I mean, FOOD.

TODAY WAS SUCH A GOOD DAY

Lemme tell ya why.

I have an unhealthy obsession with new foods/weird foods/LOBSTERS

I love lobsterssssssss

super unrelated but i think i found my halloween costume this year!

lol i have no life.

but seriously, lobsters are so interesting!

Did you know that they were once considered pauper's food and were fed to prisoners??

and i'm pretty sure i remember reading about how New England originally had so many lobsters that they were like chickens (don't ask. i can't remember where i got this info. i always remember odd things like this but can't remember any of my sources.....)

i think they also used to be a lot bigger too.

but i don't think they were ever as big as the largest lobster

which was caught in Nova Scotia on the bottom of the ocean by a net and was 44 pounds....

(i do know that all of that was fact btw)

ANYWAYSSS.

started out in south portland.

guess what we were doing. just guess.

(dramatic space for effect)

LOBSTERING!!!

so we got on this cute little lobstering boat named.....crap i can't remember.

(it will probably be in a picture....)

not gonna lie. kinda actually liked (loved) wearing those aprons.

if i marry someone from maine i will not mind going on lobstering excursions.

*side note. is lobstering a verb??? because it keeps underlining it in red!

gotta include this ridiculously overpriced picture my family bought.....

also we all look super asian besides my mom.

and the lobster kinda looked small. but that is the normal size, the guy who's boat we were on showed us the measuring thing that they are required to use according to someone with power over lobsters (lol i totally don't even know....department of agriculture, under lobster. << that was a joke i still have no clue.)

sometimes we pulled in star fish...

***ALSO random thought. I totally look like this one girl I work with in this picture!

So weird.

Once someone thought I was her...***

or sea cucumbers....

or hermit crabs.

or crabs!

I was going to put pictures of all that stuff....but we left one of our cameras at the airport....

hopefully we recover it but for now this is all I got.

Luckily I took lots of pictures and we got lots on the other camera.

okay so here comes the super text-y part.

feel free to skip if you are just looking at pics, but i want to record all the details about how to lobster (just pretend like that was a verb...? I'M REALLY TIRED RIGHT NOW OKAY?!)

okay so first they were trying to be superrrrr careful and boarded us by having us carefully sit on the edge of the boat and slowly swing our legs over. i thought that was amusing. totally not necessary haha. there were two people running the boat. the boat driver and main guy actually pulling in the traps, and a girl who was acted as a sort of tour guide telling us facts, etc. she was more kid friendly so that was good for my brothers. this tour was super hands on, which was great! so glad we went with this lobster boat instead of the others which were typically more full and where you just watched. as we were driving...maneuvering out...? holy cow i just had a brain fart. what do boats do because they don't "drive" do they...?

anyways he was telling about how he had a friend in college who lobstered and took him out two different summers and he kind of got hooked on in. he's been lobstering for about 14 years, and makes all his money on giving tours because you can't really make that much money on lobsters with the current market price (he said he would only make a 50 cent profit) and his license only allows a certain amount of lobsters to be caught daily. however we were allowed to buy a lobster that we caught at the end of the tour for $8 and i really wanted to but then we realized we didn't want to boil it in the hotel and the little place next to the wharf wasn't all that great so we passed on buying one.

he said that for him to have tours his boat had to be recognized by the coast guard. for the first few years it wasn't approved yet so he could only have a max of 6 people! which sucks....but now he can have like 20 or something. i read a little about different types of permits. some allow 6 traps, others 30, i think he had a 18 trap one because i think we went to 3 buoys and each had 2 traps and i think he took 3 different groups out a day.

so all the different fisher peeps had different colored/designed buoys that were specific to them. when we got to one of them, he would grab the buoy and pull it into the boat. he would wrap the rope around a little pulley thing-y (note my glorious vocabulary...sorry Mrs. Kurtz...you really are a fabulous teacher regardless!) and it would pull the traps up. he would pull both traps up and set them up on the edge of the boat. a lot of the times there would be kelp in it and other critters besides lobsters. one time we pulled up 15 crabs!

okay i'm going to try to explain this.

( the bait bag obviously lures in the lobsters, starfish, cucumbers, crabs, eels, ...etc. )so first there's the entrance, it is really hard for lobsters to get out of it once they have dropped in because the sides are slanted, but it is possible. once it gets in it can progress to the other side of the trap where it will crawl through a net and drop to the bottom where it will be caught for good. the escape vent is meant to filter out the too small lobsters, craps, etc.

hopefully that made a little bit of sense....

so when we pulled up the traps we would open the tops and take out all the stuff we didn't want and throw it back into the water. this included emptying the bait bag which we would replace with 5 brand new herrings (stinky oily fish that will lure predators). seagulls are used to this ritual and will gather around as we throw out all the "extras" (can't think of words, #sorrynotsorry) one of them caught a crab in its mouth, but for the most part they just eat the herrings.

as members of this crew we all got a chance to grab the dead slimy herring and fill bags with them. when we caught lobsters we would take a metal measuring thing and make sure the back of it was at least 3.25 inches long, if not we would throw it back in because it would be ready mid-July/August after it had molted and grown a bigger shell. if the back was longer than 5 inches then we would have to throw it in because that insures that there is always a mating population of lobsters in Maine. the ones that fit in the margin we rubber banded and stored in a glass water tank.

there was a couple who was one the boat with us and they noticed that my dad had a BYU (capitalized because it has utmost importance), and asked if we are mormon. i actually really like how at least one person in my family is wearing BYU gear because we meet soooo many more mormons, it's so cool! like what are the odds that we would meet other mormons in portland, MAINE, on the same lobster boat?? they were from idaho but currently live in nashville, have two kids, etc etc. don't want to be too creepy.

this brings me into my next part though, they recommended a cute little local restaurant called docks in new hampshire.

who tells you to go visit something in a different state...?

oh yeah.

anyone from the east coast because all the states are so dang close!

i think the restaurant was like 15 minutes away max. crazyyyyy.

our philosophy with eating out as a family is either everyone get their own thing (aka micky-d's or something), or everyone get cool stuff and share (aka i end up eating everything because my brothers are all picky. this one is obviously my favorite because i can try lots of new stuff).

this was a "sharing" place.

yeahhhh baby.

heaven.

we got two full lobsters, a lobster roll (you basically get a lobster roll at every place so we wanted to compare at each different place), fried shrimp, and fries.